Google Nest Audio: The New & Improved Google Home Speaker
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The original OG Google Home smart speaker that started Google’s smart speaker lineup launched 4 years ago. And since then, Google has been innovating & improving within every design/product drop. Since then, we got the Home Mini, Home Hub, Home Hub Max and then a slight rebrand to the Nest product line w/ a few more products.
Along w/ the new 5G Pixels, Google revealed a new smart speaker made to replace the original Home w/ the new Nest Audio. It retains the small footprint but remixes the look & beefs up the sound output. All while lowering the price point as well. The OG Home was $129 while the new Nest Audio is only $99. You can even save $20 when you buy 2 of them from Google. Now that we got that out of the way let’s get into what’s new. what’s good, & what can be better.
The Nest Audio takes the fabric wrapped speaker look and engulfs it completely here. Google is stepping up their green efforts which is great.
It is covered w/ a durable fabric top made from recycled plastic bottles. Even the enclosure including the fabric, housing, foot, & other smaller parts are made from 70% recycled plastic as well.
The Nest Audio looks more like a speaker as opposed to the Google Home's air freshener look.
The new-look is better to fit anywhere in your home w/ a pleasing aesthetic. Especially w/ your color options of Chalk, Charcoal, Sand, Sky & Sage to blend in many areas of your home w/ ease. Standing at 6.9inches tall and only weighing in at 2.6lbs, it can fit in many places in your home w/o taking up too much space at all.
As far as navigating the Nest speaker via touch, you have 3 designated areas on the top: the middle, the left, & right corners. You got Play/Pause in the center, volume up on the right side, & volume down on the left side. Like previous Google smart speakers, the touch areas are embedded within the design. On the rear, you got the Mic switch to mute voice commands. And the now-signature 4 color LEDs underneath it all to show it listening + processing.
Now for the most important thing about the Nest Audio: the sound. They’ve upgraded the internals from the OG Home to give it better & bigger sound. The Nest Audio brings you a 75mm mid-woofer along w/ a 19mm tweeter that makes for 50% more bass + 75% louder than the older Home that just had a single 50mm driver.
Easily exceeded my expectations in the sound department.
The sound quality is impressive as you got a good amount of bass as well as it can get pretty loud. I tested it out in our living room that has a decent amount of space as the sound filled the room up w/ ease. Beyonce & Maxwell Radio stations on Spotify as well as my wife’s Pandora One playlists were the test subjects. It was a great balance to showcase its abilities w/ Hip-hop, R&B, 80s pop hits, & more tunes. Like other Google audio products, it can be grouped w/ others like the Nest Mini, Nest Hub Max, and even your TV via a Chromecast to give your unified sound all throughout the house.
Powered by a quad-core A53 1.8GHz CPU + high-performance ML hardware engine to handle all of the processing & such. It does a good job in the time it takes to process a command & execute. It has 3 far-field mics inside of it to better hear your ‘Ok, Google’ commands. These do a good job to hear me over the music w/o me having to scream out the command. Like other Google products, it can work w/ your smart home products. It can work w/ more than 100 million devices from companies like Philips Hue, TP-Link, & more.
These new chipsets also help to adapt the Nest Audio sound output 2 different ways to give you the best experience possible. One of them is Media EQ that automatically tunes the content (music/podcasts/audiobooks) you’re listening to. And the other is Ambient IQ that adapts to the background noise to make sure you can hear the Google Assistant.
So if you couldn’t already tell, the new Nest Audio is a vast improvement over the original Google Home – as it should be years later. Small enough to place in several location sin your home, great output for its size, and not breaking your wallet to get one or even 2 of them. The only thing you could really ask for here is 360-degree sound.
Now I’m not sure this will convince hardcore Alexa users to switch over w/ the Echo still being faster to respond than Google Assistant & slightly fuller sound. Or maybe it will. Whatever the case, I’m loving mines and may pick up a 2nd one for that sweet sound in stereo.
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